Fear on an Unsteady Earth

March 11, 2011

Fear on an Unsteady Earth

“Ultimately it is upon your vulnerability that you depend.”
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

There are a lot of people to be thinking of, praying for, remembering, and loving right now, in the wake of Japan's earthquakes -- so soon after the one in New Zealand -- and the tsunamis that have chased those shaking tectonic plates around the globe. Please offer a bit of that care for my cousin, Tim, his fiancee, Azusa, and Azusa's family, who are all in Japan. This is an uneasy, fearful time, waiting to hear ... and I feel peculiarly unconnected as I write this, being several time zones away from most of my family who, perhaps, are not awake yet, and have not seen what happened on the other side of the world while they slept. And I feel an acute awareness for how striking -- like a strike, a hit, a pummeling -- it is to see headlines and commenters and social networkers blaring information for how terrible the consequences of this quake are. Numbers of dead and missing, magnitudes, links to videos of fire and walls of water and buildings transforming to dust -- as I prowl the internets looking for an indication that the particular people of my family are okay, I can't avoid seeing all that, and it is terrifying -- and yet, in a sort of quiet, shrouded way.

UPDATE: About 24 hours later, we've found that they are all safe (and apparently making sushi for dinner). Exhale.

Posted at 07:59 AM in Creative Nonviolence, Ecological, Health, Isak, Spirituality | Permalink

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